The Death of Nizar Banat at the hands of Mahmoud Abbas of the PLO By Hugh Fitzgerald

Jihad Watch : Mahmoud Abbas is now in the sixteenth year of his four-year term as President-For-Life of the Palestinian Authority. Famously corrupt, he has managed while in office to amass, with his two sons Yasser and Tareq, a fortune of $400 million.

Earlier this year he decided to call for Presidential and Parliamentary elections, under the misapprehension that he might actually win. Soon enough, public opinion polls revealed that any of Abbas’ opponents, whether Marwan Barghouti, or Mohammed Dahlan, or a candidate put up by Hamas, would win 60% of the vote in a contest with Abbas.

Abbas then decided that elections were a bad idea, and he cancelled them, on the pretext that Israel would not allow Palestinian Arabs in East Jerusalem to take part in the vote. It was a specious charge: Israel had already said the Palestinian Arabs could take part in such an election, as long as they cast their ballots in one of the villages just outside East Jerusalem, and not in East Jerusalem itself.

Abbas’ excuse did not mollify his Palestinian critics; they realized that yet again he was going to refuse to put himself to the electoral test, in order to continue his long reign of mismanagement and corruption. More and more Palestinians in the West Bank have become critics of Abbas, spreading the word on social media about his corruption and despotic ways. The beating to death of Nizar Banat of Hebron, one of the most outspoken of those critics, now has the opposition up in arms.

The story of Nizar Banat’s grisly end is told here: “Prominent Abbas critic dies in PA custody after ‘vicious beating’ by officers,” by Aaron Boxerman, Times of Israel, June 24, 2021:

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